EXPERIENCE DESIGN AND STRATEGY IN THE WORKPLACE By Daniel Montaño
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ny designer worth their salt approaches design with intention—aligned with goals that will make the building functional and purposeful. While these are critical areas of focus, a far more provocative notion is to focus on the intended feelings the user will have or how they’ll respond or behave as a result of being in a place. For example, a client may ask for their lobby to feel ‘welcoming’ or for their place of worship to feel ‘uplifting,’ and with intention, people will feel like they belong and are greeted naturally by their host, or they’ll feel closer to their maker and act more righteous. But what if your intention is to make your managers collaborate more productively so that they can innovate— can a particular office setting cause that to happen? Or what if a company’s brand promise to its customers is ‘we always put our customers’ needs first’— how would you shape an experience that made the customer feel that this is a priority? This is Experience Design, a critical step in the initial stages of designing a workplace, or any place for that matter. When done correctly, it provides the design team with a detailed depiction of how an experience unfolds for multiple user types while also providing direction for strategically locating significant elements or activities. Experience Design (often referred to as ‘XD’ or ‘Experience Strategy’) has been gaining momentum for some
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Beyond Workplace II
time now, accelerated perhaps by the 1998 book The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. The reason the ‘experience’ notion has gotten traction is that it resonates with all of us— the experiences that are worth remembering should be a central driver of design, not an accidental outcome. Experience Design is based on human-centered design principles, requiring research that results in a deep understanding of behaviors, habits and rituals. The process balances the goal of creating enhanced emotional connections with the goal of resolving functional solutions that appeal to our desire for convenience and simplicity. When looking for examples of environments that are experience-driven, the retail sector has led the way, creating store designs that are immersive, participatory and engaging. Of course, that wasn’t always the case— for decades the primary reason to go to a store was comparison of features and price. As e-commerce has continually increased market share, stealing customers away from brick & mortar, retailers have had to consider a new purpose for their stores—it’s the unique experience their brand can provide. Where does the retailer start when considering ‘what kind of experience should our store provide’ (especially if ‘shopping’ is no longer the primary driver)? They begin by looking at their brand attributes, especially those that can be ‘activated’
